Google+ Users Receive Spam, Experience Disk Space Problems

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The huge popularity of Google+ since its launch has caused the new social networking platform problems over the weekend as bugs were found in its systems code resulting from insufficient disk space. The bug resulted in users encountering multiple spam notification messages in their emails.

On a message posted on Google+, Senior Vice-President of Social Vic Gundotra, released a statement apologizing to its users for the inconvenience caused. Gundotra wrote, “Please accept our apologies for the spam we caused this afternoon. For about 80 minutes we ran out of disk space on the service that keeps track of notifications. Hence our system continued to try sending notifications. Over, and over again. Yikes.”

He continued, “We didn't expect to hit these high thresholds so quickly, but we should have. Thank you for helping us during this field trial, and once again, we are very sorry for the spam.”

The issue has not gone unnoticed though, and a number of critics have criticized Google+ for not dealing with the problem better. BBC News's technology reporter, Rory Cellan-Jones used his Twitter account to say: “Getting zillions of Google+ emails, including duplicates which is apparently a bug. Already dubious about its usefulness...”

New products can often experience teething problems in early days, but technology buffs feel in this case the problem could and should have been avoided.

Technology consultant Graham Cluely writes in an article on popular tech site nakedsecurity.com: “It's pretty embarrassing for Google+ to suffer from such a bug - you can hardly imagine how the site could conceivably "run out of disk space."

Google+ was initially launched on an invitation-only basis on June 28. Users have also been allowed to invite friends to join. Google+ is said to have already garnered over 4.5 million users since its launch.